Children with autism who have low vasopressin levels struggle to understand the thoughts of others.

Mutations in the gene DYRK1A underlie a type of autism marked by an unusually small head. The new work expands the breadth of symptoms included under the autism umbrella.

Fetal mice that have too many neurons grow to show social deficits and repetitive behaviors. The finding, reported 11 December in Cell Reports, debuts a mouse model of autism that’s based on a biological abnormality seen in some people with the disorder.

A new computational approach predicts how sequence variations in both the coding and noncoding regions of a gene affect the gene’s expression. The method, described today in Science, may help researchers understand how specific variants contribute to disorders such as autism.

Researchers are taking a second look at dozens of autism candidate genes, sequencing them in thousands of individuals to bolster the evidence linking them to autism.

A group of scientists is using fast, accurate and minimally invasive measurement systems to revive the once-tedious trade of dysmorphology, or the study of unusual facial features, in autism.

Each child with autism is different from the next. One approach rapidly gaining momentum makes sense of this diversity by grouping children together based on their genetics, then looking for patterns in their symptoms. The long-term aim: personalized treatments for each subtype of autism.

The memory and sleep troubles that accompany fragile X syndrome originate in a glitch in insulin signaling, suggests an unpublished study of fruit flies presented today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The study points to a widely available diabetes treatment for the syndrome.

Mice missing PTEN, a strong autism candidate gene, in a subtype of inhibitory neurons in one part of the brain show signaling abnormalities and social deficits. Researchers presented the unpublished work yesterday at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.